INTRODUCTION

Parallels is a virtual-machine hypervisor that allows one to run multiple operating systems concurrently.

Plan 9 now runs well on Parallels 4 and 5, including PXE booting of diskless emulated Plan 9 machines. It may be necessary to configure devices in all four standard IDE slots (first two controllers, master and slave devices) to avoid killing the virtual machine.

The 3xxx build series for Parallels works flawlessly with Plan 9. As for the 4xxx build series (Parallels Version 3), Plan 9 frequently crashes and works unreliably. Try turning off VT-x acceleration in this case. Plan 9 works on the 5xxx build series without problems.

INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS

• Obtain the Plan 9 nightly CD image and attach it to Parallels as the CDROM drive (don't bother burning it).
• Change the boot order to boot the CDROM drive first then start the VM.
• Follow the normal installation rules for Plan 9
• Parallels 3.0 will only boot from a CD attached as sdC1, but 9load (the Plan 9 boot loader) will try to boot into sdD0. In that case, you'll have to explicitly tell 9load where to find the cd image at the 'boot from:' prompt:

		sdC1!cdboot!9pccd.gz

• I had trouble formatting the disk until I remade it without the expanding option.

CONFIGURATION SETTINGS IN PLAN 9

In your plan9.ini file set the following:

• mouseport=ps2intellimouse
• monitor=vesa
• *nomp=1
• vgasize=1024x768x24

The resolution actually depends on the resolution of your Mac. Look in the 'Displays' section of 'System Preferences' for a list of valid resolutions. I was able to get a resolution of 1440x852 working on my Macbook Pro 17" this way. For the maximum resolution of 1680x1050 however, I had to add it to the custom video resolution list in the 'Video' options of Parallels. All resolutions work with a depth of 24 (32 never works for some reason). At 1680x1050, you can run Plan 9 in fullscreen! On a plain MacBook, vgasize=1280x800x32 works well for fullscreen.

The CD-ROM, Ethernet and VESA video work out of the box. The only thing left to do is configure audio.

CONFIGURING AUDIO SUPPORT

You need to grab the AC'97 sound driver from aki's site on 9grid (down as of 20080920, any alternate download locations?):

cd /sys/src/9/pc
hget -o audio.h http://9grid.net/aki/src/9/pc/audio.h
hget -o audioac97.c http://9grid.net/aki/src/9/pc/audioac97.c
hget -o audioac97mix.c http://9grid.net/aki/src/9/pc/audioac97mix.c
hget -o ../port/devaudio.c http://9grid.net/aki/src/9/port/devaudio.c

Now edit your pcf configuration and add the driver to the link section:

link
		audioac97	audioac97mix

and build the kernel:

mk 'CONF=pcf'

Replace your old kernel with the new one:

9fat:
cp 9pcf /n/9fat/

You may want to add this line to your lib/profile:

bind -a '#A' /dev

Get madplay from contrib on sources to play mp3s.